Pinterest adds NOPIN code to avoid copyright concerns

If you're a user of Pinterest, you might not like this development. There have been increasing concerns over copyright issues with the raging popularity of Pinterest. Pinterest has grown very quickly from 4.9 million unique visitors in November of 2011 to over 11 million unique visitors as of January 2011. The massive growth is attributed in part to integration with Facebook that launched in January. As more users pin photos of all sorts of things to their Pinterest pages, copyright concerns have been mounting. This has led to Pinterest offering a way for website owners to block Pinterest pinning.

To help diffuse the copyright concerns Pinterest has introduced new code the website owners can integrate that will prevent Pinterest users from being able to pin the sites content to their profiles. The simple code is dubbed NOPIN and appears to be a meta-tag. What happens when a visitor attempts to pin content to Pinterest from a site running this code is a message will pop up telling them pinning is not allowed.

I for one still don't understand why a company wouldn't want people to share their goods even if that sharing involves photos. I think many companies are going overboard with their copyright concerns. I can only imagine that blocking people from pinning things to Pinterest or sharing them on Facebook will hurt the brand in the end.